Magazine Crafts
Magazines are an excellent source of colorful images and patterns you can turn into picture mats, buttons, and other crafty paper pieces—including fun “coin specimen” embellishments. With just a few stamps, some ink, glue, and your favorite art style, you can transform scraps into something fresh and decorative.
This project highlights simple coin-style specimens.
What you’ll need:
- A piece of card-stock-weight paper for the base
- A 2.5″ × 5″ strip of your collaged paper
- Two 2¼″ squares for the insert design
- 1.5″ circle punch
If you don’t have a circle punch, simply adjust your strip dimensions to suit the shape you do have, then fold the strip and punch (or cut) a window in the center of one side. You can use hearts, stars, ovals, scallops—any shape works. A thinner base paper is best since you’ll be folding it.
For the picture mats, collage your “junk paper” onto packaging material and cut it out with dies that match your frame sizes. If you don’t have dies, an X-Acto or utility knife will do—just measure and cut your mat openings by hand.
This technique is perfect for using up leftover paper scraps: wrapping paper, tissue, book pages, paper bags, or any discarded print material. And you can build your designs around any theme you like:
- Comic books
- Text or letters
- Manga
- Florals
- Plants
- Nature
- Sports
- Animals
- Kitchen motifs
- Abstracts
- Colors or patterns
- Vintage imagery
Challenge yourself to see how many decorative or functional items you can create while exploring a new style. You can even build a collection of unique artsy mats to sell.
Happy paper crafting!